Biography robert koch

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Who Was Robert Koch?

Physician Robert Koch is best known for isolating the tuberculosis bacterium, the cause of numerous deaths in the midth century. He won the Nobel Prize in for his work. He is considered one of the founders of microbiology and developed criteria, named Koch's postulates, that were meant to help establish a causal relationship between a microbe and a disease.

Bacterial Discoveries

Robert Koch has been celebrated for his research into the causes of notable diseases and presenting solutions to safeguard public health:

Anthrax

While employed in private practice as a physician in Wollstein, Koch set to work on identifying the root cause of the anthrax that had felled livestock in the region. By inoculating healthy animals with infected tissue, he determined the ideal environment for the anthrax bacillus to spread, including transmission through soil by spores. Koch became the first to link a specific bacterium with a specific disease, propelling him to fame with the publication of his findings in

Tuberculosis

After moving to the the Imperial Health Office in Berlin, Koch began his work on discovery of the tubercle bacillus. He painstakingly tried out different stains to reveal the nature of the bacteria, as well as the ideal media in which to grow colonies for study. Inoculating more than animals with bacilli from pure cultures, he determined that sputum was the principal source of the disease's transmission, requiring the sterilization of clothes and bed sheets from infected patients.

Koch's presentation of his findings, at a meeting of the Berlin Physiological Society in , is considered a watershed moment in medical history. In , he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in helping to curb the spread of the deadly disease.

Cholera

Following his resounding success with TB, Koch was sent to Egypt and Calcutta, India, to investigate the outbreak of cholera in those areas. He identified the bacillus and i

German physician and bacteriologist (–)

For other people named Robert Koch, see Robert Koch (disambiguation).

Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch (KOKH;German:[ˈʁoːbɛʁtˈkɔx]; 11 December – 27 May ) was a German physician and microbiologist. As the discoverer of the specific causative agents of deadly infectious diseases including tuberculosis, cholera and anthrax, he is regarded as one of the main founders of modern bacteriology. As such he is popularly nicknamed the father of microbiology (with Louis Pasteur), and as the father of medical bacteriology. His discovery of the anthrax bacterium (Bacillus anthracis) in is considered as the birth of modern bacteriology. Koch used his discoveries to establish that germs "could cause a specific disease" and directly provided proofs for the germ theory of diseases, therefore creating the scientific basis of public health, saving millions of lives. For his life's work Koch is seen as one of the founders of modern medicine.

While working as a private physician, Koch developed many innovative techniques in microbiology. He was the first to use the oil immersion lens, condenser, and microphotography in microscopy. His invention of the bacterial culture method using agar and glass plates (later developed as the Petri dish by his assistant Julius Richard Petri) made him the first to grow bacteria in the laboratory. In appreciation of his work, he was appointed to government advisor at the Imperial Health Office in , promoted to a senior executive position (Geheimer Regierungsrat) in , Director of Hygienic Institute and Chair (Professor of hygiene) of the Faculty of Medicine at Berlin University in , and the Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases (later renamed Robert Koch Institute after his death) in

The methods Koch used in bacteriology led to the establishment of a m

Main Article Content

How did a country physician in 19 century Europe emerge as an icon in the world of medicine for all times to come? What inspires and motivates a discoverer to achieve what many observed and debated before him but were unable to achieve? What sweat and toil culminate in irrefutable evidence that peers accept and generations follow, expand and investigate? Is a landmark discovery, invention or innovation merely an idea whose time has come? The succeeding paragraphs illustrate how one man’s life and times provide an answer to these complex questions and forever relegate the pre-Koch era of tuberculosis (TB) to antiquity.3

Born Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch, in , this Prussian physician’s abbreviated name ‘Robert Koch’ became a byword in infectious diseases practice, for having identified the bacillary aetiology of TB, the 19 century scourge.4 The enormous public health impact of this discovery on a disease that, at the time, claimed the lives of humans in epidemic proportions, overshadowed his first contribution to the field of bacteriology: the identification of the Bacillus anthracis. The juggernaut of bacterial discoveries continued with the identification of the Staphylococcus species (wound infections) and the Vibrio cholerae bacterium (cholera).5

The Pied Piper of Bacteriology

The date of Friday 24 March became a milestone in medical microbiology when Koch’s brilliant exposition of his findings on TB was witnessed, in the reading room of the library of the Institute of Physiology at 7pm, by the dazzled fraternity of the Berlin Physiological Society.4 He explained and illustrated all the scientific evidence, which his laboratory and animal experiments had yielded for the identification and isolation of the tubercle bacillus and demonstrated its transmissible nature and how it caused TB in man. Four seminal papers followed that stamped his mark on his discovery.6 This new concept of an exogenous agent initiating